Today in class we continued our look at the Cold War and American domestic and foreign issues in the 1940's and 1950's.
We began by having a brief discussion about the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, considering the concept of containment and how the Marshall Plan helped to accomplish that.
We then turned our attention to the end of the Korean War and a continued examination of ideas of fear, conformity and rebellion. We used the next episode of The Century (Happy Days) to help inform our ideas. The video is embedded below and the viewing guide is here.
After the break, Mr. Rigler read a poem called America by Allan Ginsberg which reflected on the era portrayed in the film. We responded to the poem in our notebooks by trying to identify what Ginsberg's point was. After a discussion of the poem, we created our own version of an America poem modeled after Ginsberg's work.
Your HOMEWORK for Friday is to first, watch 3:03-9:19 (just these 6 minutes) from Poisoned Dreams in order to introduce John F. Kennedy and then read and annotate parts of four different speeches from him. The first speech is his Inaugural Address which you can find in the American Reader (which you will have to bring to class on Friday) and the others are in this Kennedy Speeches Packet which you will have to PRINT out. We will be using and responding to these speeches in class on Friday so there is no journal entry necessary but we will be checking in your annotations.
